Dark End of the Street

“I ain’t got no kids,” I mumbled, following her. We stepped into a wide wood-paneled room that smelled like burnt Italian food. It was dimly lit with a television flashing a Chevy truck commercial.

A little boy with inky-black hair lay on a tattered couch, a coloring book loose in his hands. An older black woman came out from the kitchen wiping her hands with a rag and exchanged a few words with Maggie before disappearing out a side door.

I stood, afraid to wake the kid.

The floor was buckled linoleum and dotted with broken trucks and headless plastic heroes. She’d lined the walls with frames filled with photos too personal to have been bought. Black-and-whites of headstones and old people on porches and brilliant white suns setting low across cotton fields.

“Yours?” I asked.

She nodded and handed Abby a Golden Flake potato chip box filled with mail. Maggie picked up the boy, slack but grumbling, and left the room. Abby dropped the box onto the old sofa and I took a seat by her.

The woman had been watching Leno and I quickly flipped the channels to Letterman with a heavy remote. The sofa was thick with animal hair. Above the mantel gazed a mounted deer head.

Abby flipped through several letters, mailers, and magazines. I noticed a couple. Southern Living. Soldier of Fortune.

She stared at the outside of one envelope longer than the others and then quickly tore into it. She read it for a few moments. Her lips slightly parted and she used her right hand to brush the hair from her face onto the back of her ear. She tucked her legs up under her, shook her head, and then handed the letter to me.

The letterhead was, like Maggie said, from a private investigator in Memphis named Art Copeland. He wrote pretty simply that he intended to keep the deposit that Bill MacDonald had given him. He said he’d exhausted his search through Social Security, criminal, and Department of Motor Vehicles records. Still, he could not find out more about the man Abby’s father wanted.

I’m sorry but there is no record of Clyde James since 1974.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Holy shit,” Abby said.

The rain hit us as soon as we reached this wide-porched white house on the outskirts of Oxford. Man, it felt like it had been raining since I arrived in Memphis and I just wished it would stop for a few minutes. I was tired of being wet and cold and having to change clothes about every hour. Somehow, the rain felt different here as we ran to the house. Felt much colder and more brittle, little tiny needles angled at my face.

We clamored up onto the porch filled with dead plants in mossy terra-cotta pots. Abby walked ahead of me, pulling out a key from her balled fist.

Crime-scene tape covered the back entrance and it looked like someone had tried to lock up the house. A padlock had been ripped from the frame and it sat dangling and useless.

Abby tossed it aside and opened the door’s dead bolt. We ran inside as thunder boomed in the thick night, making patting sounds in the pine forest.

As we entered, thunder boomed again and shook the dark house.

She tried the light switch but nothing worked. I clicked on my lighter and Abby scurried off for a few seconds and returned with two thick candles. She rushed back into the room as if the other rooms lacked oxygen and she could only breathe when she was next to me.

“Where’s the office?” I asked.

She carefully held the candles as I, slightly shivering from the cold rain, lit them and followed her to the back of the house. The thunder crashed pretty damned close to us again and Abby reeled but caught herself and kept walking. I knew she could hear the gunshots in her head and it gave me a thick lump in my throat as I watched her trying to ignore the sounds and images.

She rolled back some wide-paneled doors and pointed at a large wooden desk and two tall metal file cabinets. The walls were painted a deep red and lined with prints of Confederate battle scenes. There was a collection of antique guns mounted on the wall.

Abby sat on the couch, teeth chattering pretty badly. Lightning spliced in a blue and purple zigzag outside and she covered her face with her hands.

“Do you have any clothes here?” I asked, trying to get her mind on something else.

She nodded, face in hands. “No.”

“Still at the dorm?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Abby, I’ll go with you. Where’s your room?”

She stayed still for a few moments and then she wordlessly got to her feet and circled around the den to a short hallway and a room covered in art print posters. Renoir. Picasso. On a long blue bookshelf, she had several trophies topped with gold horses. An old cowboy hat sat crooked on a life-size cutout of James Dean.

The room smelled stale and dead. Almost like some of the museums in New Orleans. Place had the feeling that nothing should be touched here. In the candlelight, Abby carefully opened an antique dresser and pulled out a pair of old jeans and a sweatshirt.